Before the invention of the cotton gin, cotton fiber was literally picked apart from the seeds by hand. This proved to be very time consuming, tiring, and very inefficient. The invention of the Cotton Gin, by Eli Whitney, in 1793 was a marvelous innovation that dramatically increased the supply of cotton fiber.
Eli Whitney was born in Westboro, Massachusetts on December 8, 1765 and died on Jan. 8, 1825. At a young age, Eli Whitney showed unusual mechanical ability. This ability kept him employed making and fixing various machines and paid his way through Yale University. Eli graduated in 1792 where he then traveled to Savannah, Georgia, where he had plans to teach while studying law (Travelers, 684). While in Georgia, Whitney met Phineas Miller, another Yale graduate who was close to his age who managed a plantation owned by the widow of the American Revolutionary War general Nathanael Greene. Catherine Greene employed Whitney to solve several mechanical problems (Foner, 1150). Eli Whitney then found an opportunity that was more to his liking and promised great rewards. After learning that the tedious and time-consuming task of picking the seeds out of cotton fiber blocked the commercial production of short-staple, green-seed cotton, he decided he wanted to create a machine that would do the job.
By April 1793, Whitney had designed and constructed the cotton gin, a machine that automated the separation of cottonseed from the short-staple cotton fiber. The cotton gin allowed one man to do the work of fifty. Eli Whitney's .
machine was the first to clean short-staple cotton. His cotton engine consisted of spiked teeth mounted on a boxed revolving cylinder which, when turned by a crank, pulled the cotton fiber through small slotted openings so as to separate the seeds from the lint -- a rotating brush, operated via a belt and pulleys, removed the fibrous lint from the projecting spikes (Gies, 122).
